Telstra acts against Usenet spammers

By Online StaffMarch 10 2003

Several Telstra broadband customers are about to lose their accounts after they were identified as being among those who have been spamming newsgroups, Stuart Gray, the public affairs manager for BigPond, said today.

Earlier, Gray had said no complaints had been received at newsmaster@bigpond.com which, he said, was the email address to which complaints should be sent. However, he called up to clarify that this statement applied to dial-up customers.

"The broadband customers whom I referred to have not been observing the acceptable use policy which we have," he said. "They will be kicked off as soon as possible."

Asked whether the customers in question would not be first warned, Gray said the acceptable use policy had been violated by these users and thus there was no question of a warning.

The action follows a notice to Telstra that it should reduce the amount of spam being posted to news groups through its servers.
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Once a request has been made, it is discussed to determine if there is a consensus among other sites and administrators that it is justified. During this discussion, others sometimes attempt to contact the ISP in question and resolve the problem.

If it is generally agreed that a UDP is warranted, then the offending ISP is informed and given five days to rectify matters. After this, messages from the offending ISP are blocked by administrators of news servers.

In his RFD, Ritz said: "Telstra has an abysmal history with respect to ignoring long term
net-abuse issues. Trying to get any response from them is next to
impossible. In the past five years, I've only managed to elicit a
response from them on one issue.